On most of us in these poems, both the living and the dead.
Maybe it’s true that we are always—in writing and in memory—
lightly fictionalized versions of the people we were then.

On me, too, if I have smoothed some rough edges or roughed
some that should stay smooth. I finally got that rock tumbler
from the Sears Wish Book, but I don’t know how to use it.

But no mercy for Howard Durst, still. He deserves judgment,
not having received it in life; we girls could not speak it yet,
or we lived in a world that was not designed to hear.

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Today’s Poem a Day Chapbook Challenge prompt was “Have _____.”